WFRP 4e: State of the Line

I thought it would be interesting to reflect on current product line for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Fourth Edition. What are its strengths? Where are the gaps? Naturally, I can’t resist including my predictions and hopes for future products.

One of the things that is pretty clear is that Cubicle 7 have taken an approach of mining the treasure trove of great material from the history of the WFRP game and updating the best of it into the new system. There are a huge amount of First Edition adventures now repurposed for Fourth Edition – not least the first three¹ parts of the Enemy Within campaign – as well as a handful of Third Edition adventures.

There’s a certain amount of sense in this. First Edition had a lot of genuinely excellent adventures (just think of Rough Night at the Three Feathers, Night of Blood, Shadows over Bogenhafen, Grapes of Wrath), most of which weren’t officially updated to Second Edition and all out of print for decades. Meanwhile the much more recent Third Edition was ignored by a large portion of the fandom on account of its abrupt change in game system, but apparently contains some very good material. Again, it makes sense to take the best of this and rework it for the audience that missed out on it before.

What promises to be a nice, relaxing night at the sign of the Three Feathers. (Technically this is an image from the 2nd Edition version, but there aren’t any particularly exciting images in the original version.)

Nevertheless from a purely selfish perspective, this approach didn’t delight me: I own almost all of First Edition so updates to a new edition weren’t terribly exciting (in spite of the new and fabulous artwork accompanying them). And early on in Fourth Edition’s life, I had my concerns that an awful lot of the 4e publications were updates of previously-published adventures. In mid 2020, two years after the line has begun, probably over half the 4e publications were mostly reworkings of previously-published material!

I’m very happy to say that those concerns have been allayed. Three years on, 4e has produced a lot more completely original material, including venturing into completely new territories and detailing cities never touched in WFRP.

I would say that the strengths of the line currently are:

• Short adventures. There are an astonishing number of short adventures available for 4e across the three Ubersreik Adventures books, Rough Nights and Hard Days, the Enemy Within Companions and the Old World Adventures (pdf-only) series. By my count there are something like 35 short adventures available currently, and that’s not counting the adventure outlines in One Shots of the Reikland and The Starter Set.
• Adventure hooks. Every sourcebook is absolutely stuffed with interesting hooks for adventures, making it clear how (say) a random bakery in Ubersreik could be more than just one sentence of background colour as the PCs wander past.
• The Enemy Within campaign. I’ve only read the first part of the new “Director’s Cut” campaign so far, but by my most accounts this has taken one of the greatest RPG campaigns of all time, presented it to a new audience and given it a much improved ending.
• City sourcebooks. There are now sourcebooks detailing four major cities (Ubersreik, Middenheim, Altdorf and Salzenmund) with another on Marienburg apparently on the horizon. I’ve read two of those and they are (without exaggeration) the best city guides I’ve ever read.
• There is also what I hope is the beginning of an exploration of lands outside the Old World², with Sea of Claws the and Lustria sourcebook. While Second Edition WFRP provided some great coverage of the Empire, Bretonnia and Kislev (providing each with its own sourcebook) it never really ventured beyond the shores of the Old World³, so this is a very welcome development.
• Artwork. This is consistently fantastic – beautiful, evocative and really helpful for bringing the setting to life.
• Interesting NPCs. Time and again, 4e NPCs are memorable and interesting. Often they are funny (two in the GM’s Screen Booklet are hilarious), other times they are tragic, or weird, or just relatable. Each one having a portrait is incredibly helpful.

Pictured: interesting NPCs featured in a short adventure set in a fantastic city. Copyright Cubicle 7

At the same time there are some less welcome characteristics of the line:

• Fragmentation of information – by which I mean information scattered across many different books. This is not something which is confined to WFRP Fourth Edition by any means but it is still annoying: currently to get all the current, updated rules for doing basic things, you need the Rulebook plus Up In Arms (for updated advantage rules) and Winds of Magic (for updating channelling rules).⁴ Rules for Altdorf characters have been provided in Archives of the Empire III instead of being included in the Altdorf book where they should have originally been. Religion is a particular offender, with deep-dive treatments of different deities (including the relevant specialist priest career) scattered across half a dozen sourcebooks.
• Focus on the Reikland. This was extremely noticeable in the first few years of the line, and has lessened over time as we’ve got sourcebooks on cities in other Empire Provinces and even books venturing outside the Empire, but I know it annoys some people. I have more mixed feelings about this – on the one hand the Reikland is a huge area with loads of interesting settlements in it, so you really could happily set an entire campaign there. On the other hand… it does feel very limited to only focus on one of the Empire’s ten Grand Provinces, never mind the rest of the Old World!

One thing I’ve noticed is that it seems that Cubicle 7 have taken considerable pains to avoid replicating material from Second Edition WFRP. I don’t think we’ve seen a single second edition adventure updated for Fourth Edition. There don’t seem to be any plans to do what would appear to be obvious supplements like a guide to the Empire (which is in my opinion a glaring omission in the current line), or Bretonnia (which would be particularly timely given the current status of Bretonnia as one of the poster-boy factions for the new The Old World tabletop wargame by Games Workshop), or Kislev (again, fairly timely given its status as the default faction in Total War: Warhammer 3). That also provides an explanation for why we don’t have a religion book, but instead have information on the main deities scattered throughout other supplements – since C7 probably don’t want to replicate a (very good) book which was already 80% system-neutral anyway.

Where are my Ice Witches riding armoured bears? Copyright Creative Assembly.

What do I hope to see in future?

We already know that Cubicle 7 are planning books on Ulthuan, Greenskins and Chaos, along with the aforementioned Marienburg supplement (hooray!) and Deft Steps, Light Fingers – a ranger-and-rogues-themed book. There are occasional rumblings about another big campaign too (perhaps outside the Old World?) but nothing at all concrete.

My hope is that C7 will produce more material on regions outside the Empire to accompany Lustria and Ulthuan. Naggaroth would be an obvious choice, although I have to say that doesn’t particularly interest me. Cathay would be really interesting, and it doesn’t seem as impossible as would once have been the case, given its inclusion as a playable faction in Total War: Warhammer 3. I would actually love to see sourcebooks on the neglected nations in and near the Old World: Tilea, Estalia and Albion. Sadly I’m not sure that is likely – Tilea has already had a (sadly brief) treatment in Up In Arms. On the other hand Albion seems to me like a really obvious choice, since its easily accessible from the Sea of Claws (which we already have a supplement for) and a nice stop-off on the way to Ulthuan or Lustria. We’ll see.

Maybe? Image from Total War: Warhammer 3, copyright Creative Assembly

I really hope we will get another big juicy campaign – particularly one venturing outside the Empire. I love 4e’s short adventures, but I yearn for a nice big adventure that isn’t part of the Enemy Within campaign! I’d love to see a campaign which takes the PCs to Lustria – perhaps setting off from Salzenmund, voyaging through the Sea of Claws, stopping off on Ulthuan and finally landing on the shores of Lustria?

Otherwise I suspect we might get some more class-focused books (although I’m not sure: I can envisage an Academic-focused or Courtier-focused book, but I feel like a book themed around Peasants or Burgher might be a hard sell!), more Archives of the Empire (no bad thing in my opinion) and perhaps more city guides. I’d love a proper guide to Nuln please! Or maybe a Tilean City-State?

And lastly: please Cubicle 7 could you do a nice guide to the whole Empire? I know we have Sigmar’s Heirs (the 2nd Edition sourcebook) but it feels like half the provinces in that book can basically be described as “Archaon killed half the population and the rest are refugees” which isn’t particularly helpful for a world in which the ‘Storm of Chaos’ (yuck) didn’t take place.

So there we go. Comments, feedback and disagreement welcome.

1. I stubbornly insist that Shadows Over Bogenhafen, Death on the Reik and Power Behind the Throne are actually adventures 2, 3 and 4 in the campaign, but most people seem to regard the short first adventure Mistaken Identify as being part of Shadows, I think because that’s how it was published in the Hogshead 1st Edition reprint as well as in the 4th Edition version. ↩︎
2. The Old World being basically Warhammer’s version of Europe ↩︎
3. Although admittedly they did provide detail on Norsca in Tome of Corruption ↩︎
4. I’m not talking about things like introducing Ogres as a playable race or introducing mass combat rules (both in Archives of the Empire II) – those are exactly the sort of optional bits that makes sense in a supplement. It’s when you’re basically fixing core rules that it is annoying to have to flip between different books to get all the rules. ↩︎